Expected, but still insanely cool: Canonical has just announced Ubuntu for phones. This is a new mobile phone operating system, with its own user interface and development platform. It's built around Qt5 and QML, and the interface reminds me of MeeGo on the N9. It's supposed to be on the shelves in early 2014, but the developer preview is out today.

For starters it's designed to run in a VM, dragging all kinds of extra baggage with it.

No. C# is not tied to .NET or a JIT in any way. Mono does ahead of time compiling on most mobile platforms it supports. Windows Phone 8 does cloud compiling, and Windows 8 does Install time NGEN as a Service.

You really don't know what you're talking about. Mono has this functionality today. So does .NET.

Furthermore, there is choice. If you want a JIT (and I do want a JIT), you can use it, if you don't, you don't have to. It's really that simple.

More importantly: It is little used by Linux developers. If Ubuntu wishes to draw on existing software developers familiar with Linux, and on existing software written for Linux, it is a bad choice because they'd be alienating most of the developers already familiar with their OS, and throwing out the vast majority of existing code.

That's exactly the problem. Development on Linux is a royal pain in the ass. Immature UI toolkits, terrible tooling experience, etc.

Its completely disjointed. Contrast it, to say the experience of using C# (with MonoMac, MonoDroid, MonoTouch for iOS, Mono on the PS3, Unity, Windows Phone, the Windows Runtime, .NET) and you quickly have a developer base that vastly out numbers what the current situation is.

There is an army of C# developers. Look at Microsoft's platform ramp up speeds. The Windows Store has over 30,000 apps in a very short limited of time. The Windows Phone Store has over 120,000 apps.

Xamarin has seem incredible success with Mono and plenty of top games/apps across many app stores use MonoTouch or Unity.

This is exactly the myopic view that dooms Linux. They focus on maintaining what they have instead of expanding to what they don't.

Besides, if Ubuntu on Phones is to gain any kind of world wide traction, it will need people outside the traditional Linux developer circles. That is more than likely to be people with C# knowledge, and not people with Qt.

Do you really think a majority of people on Linux know Qt/QML when there is such a rift between the toolkits? No.

What do you expect them to do? Put up with that bullshit Meta Object Compiler which tries so hard to be C# and a C# like language that it ends up as a completely disjointed, ridiculous experience?

Sometimes I wonder if the people who attempt to argue with me on this have spent a day developing even a reasonably large project using such primitive tooling.

Its easy for you to get on a pedestal and spread FUD at the detriment of developers when you're not the one who has to go through the pain, or bear the increased cost of productivity loss.

To me it is nonsensical to use untried, unproven, immature technologies which has never had any kind of success in a mobile operating system, and raise all kinds of barriers to entry by providing yet another language, framework, and toolkit that people need to learn.

The lack of pragmatism is what dooms Linux in many respects. Too many people who think exactly like you do get in the way of developers who legitimately would love to extend their support to alternative platforms.

You're naive. There's plenty of indication that Microsoft were pulling strings in the SCO case, for example, via an investment vehice. Even if they weren't, there's nothing stopping them from pulling a stunt like that going forward. Microsoft might have made a promise. But that promise is only on behalf of themselves, and would not prevent them from throwing some lucrative deals to the right patent trolls. There's also nothing stopping them from using *other* patents to threaten companies with a long, drawn out patent lawsuit to punish c# use they don't like without breaking their promise.

I guess the W3C must be naïve then too. So are people who use their DNS and DHCP patents. And patents relating to ICMP and their SMTP extensions to name a few. They're all covered by the same non aggression promise.

FUD. Plain and simple.

Putting your faith in the morality of someone who is convicted of repeatedly breaking anti-trust law is rather risky.

What would you rather do? You think Linux is immune to patents? Or C++? or Qt? No one is immune to patent litigation, and often you use those without as an explicit a guarantee as Microsoft provides.

But I get it, it doesn't align with your world view, so the obvious patent scare must only come when using Microsoft technology.

We're under no obligation to like their product

I never said you were, I just said that your lack of respect and recognition for a company that's probably done as much to further the cause of Linux as any other, is very telling.